Designated Survivor
by likerealpeopledo
Summary: This is friendship. Even if you're lying to him, and yourself. A fix-it fic post-AYITL NOW UPDATED/complete with second chapter.
1. The Science of Suitcases

**_Then_** :

The tip of Logan's nose brushes the back of her knee, his words vibrating into the cartilage, "I'm done with ultimatums."

Rory's not completely on this plane of existence, what with the magical way he's doing that thing with his fingers, but she registers the scrapey sound of his voice, and the fizzy feeling in her joints, "What ulti-who?" Her toes curl in the sheets, her own fingers pressing into the tops of his shoulders.

He's only a thatch of blonde hair and busy hands that suddenly still, his face obscured by moonlight and her own soft flesh. "It doesn't have to be just one way, Rory. You, or," _He's not going to say it_ , "Not you." _He didn't say it._

He's an expert in pulling her apart and putting her back together, and she tries to savor it because she knows how temporary it all is. Every kiss, every flick of his tongue is a promise he can't possibly keep, but she's going to allow him the lie.

Afterward, they lay head to toe, tangled and sweat-slicked and languid, both of them drowsy and sated. Logan's left hand rests possessively over the knob of Rory's ankle, and she's tracing little circles on the sinew of his calf muscle, and it's been years since she's felt this full. Like when he kisses her, she has to remind herself that the sun is a star and does not actually exist in his smile.

Except the name that Logan won't say is still humming between them, ensuring that there is always going to be distance, no matter how few millimeters actually separate him from Rory.

And it's how she ends up here, isn't it? It's one night in Hamburg, and then subsequent nights in subsequent cities, and then it's just choices that no one seems to make for themselves.

If at all.

 _ **Now**_ :  
The phone vibrates against her bedside table and shakes Rory out of the heavy limbed, disoriented kind of sleep that makes it hard to discern dream state from reality. It's Logan's voice, rusty and bare. "Are you up?"

The LED lights form a 1,3,6 and it occurs to her that it's probably even later where Logan is. "Urm."

"I'm sorry, Ace, I just needed to...Go back to sleep."

"No, I'm up. I'm up." She sits straighter in bed, pulling the quilt up with her, as if he can see her nightgown through the phone. As if her modesty is even at play here now that she's pregnant.

She's still having trouble with the reality of all that anyway, no matter how many blood tests and notifications to her phone informing her of embryo sizes and their relation to a variety of legumes and root vegetables, as if she'll later be making a fetal soup, and not producing an actual, small human.

"How's the book?" He isn't calling to inquire about her writing. She's seen the news, and the internet, and her grandmother's texted her seventeen times in pristinely punctuated grammar about the private plane with the mechanical failure, and the media mogul and his wife contained therein.

"The book is fine." She doesn't mean to be so short with him. She's tired, and she's worried, and she's had that ongoing nightmare about baby arms stretching out of her belly button four consecutive nights; the connotations of which are far too terrifying to parse. But Logan has just lost both parents and she's already selfish in so many ways, this cannot be one of them. "Hey, are you okay?"

"Am I supposed to be?" His words are taut, a razor wire of too-thin emotion.

Her own guilt swells, softening her tone. "Logan."

There's a beat of silence, maybe ice cubes, maybe sheets rustling. "I wish you were here, Ace. I need a friend. I could use a friend."

"I'm here."

"But I'd rather it if you were here. This here. Not that here."

"Well, that's the here I am. Here here, not there here."

"Uh, Ace, is Grover about to conduct a physical demonstration of the words here and there for us?"

"No. Please, get some rest. Everything will look better in the morning." She hopes she's managing to convey some kind of patting motion with her tone, even over the phone.

"You gonna be here when I wake up?" He sounds small, and disembodied. Not nearly Logan enough, hollow.

"Logan." Less gentle.

"I'll send a car. Don't pack. Just come downstairs when the bell rings."

"I can't. I have to meet with my editor tomorrow, and-"

"No one cares if you Skype in. Just go downstairs when the bell rings, Rory. For me. Okay, that's not probably enough of an impetus. For the good of humanity. Think of the children."

He doesn't know how true that is and that fact isn't lost on her. Her bed is warm and her closet has never seemed so far away, but Logan's never sounded like this before. Not when he lost millions of dollars on a whim, not when he careened off the side of a mountain on a dare.

It could be Pavlovian, but when her doorbell rings, she's packed.

By the time the plane lands, Logan's already texted her the particulars for check-in at the hotel; code name, room number, concierge he likes (John Gregory Dunne, Presidential Suite, Salome, respectively). She doesn't have any bags really, just an overnight case, and the bellman doesn't really know what to do with her, so they stand awkwardly in the elevator together while it ascends the forty-five floors to Logan's room. The doors open into a cavernous foyer that is completely devoid of light, except for what the elevator provides, and Rory sincerely hopes that she can feel her way toward a bedroom somehow without knocking over any Faberge eggs or porcelain statues of Sisyphus.

"Rory?" Logan's voice is thick with disuse, but it helps her decide which direction to turn in the velvety darkness. She hasn't seen him since that morning in New Hampshire, hasn't spoken to him since then, either. A beautifully wrapped package had arrived shortly after they parted, no card. She never opened it, but she had had her suspicions.

"Yes, it's me. It's just...I don't know where the light switch," She bumps up against an ottoman that once probably belonged to an Ottoman, "I can't seem to find…"

"Marco?"

"Polo!"

"Marco!"

She arrives at the doorway, finally, a little sweaty from the panic of disorientation. "Found you."

"Marco." Logan says again, this time almost under his breath. Her eyes are adjusting to the darkness, and she can finally make out Logan's shape in the king sized bed. "So," he starts, rather conversationally, "I'm having a bit of an existential crisis here."

Half drunk bottles of scotch and whiskey and god-knows-what else give way to empty tumblers lined up along the bedside table, and the spent condensation glistens like crescent moons in the half-light.

Logan scoots up and over to make room and Rory repositions herself in the open space, kicking off her shoes and climbing in completely, careful not to allow any limbs to touch. Oblivious (or maybe, absolutely purposefully) Logan bridges the gap by resting his cheek on her shoulder, matching the rest of his body to hers. It takes her breath away a little, the straight line of warmth suddenly stretched along her limbs, the proximity. "I don't think I know who exactly I'm supposed to be if Shira and Mitchum aren't here to tell me not to be it."

"You are the only you that you can be, Logan." She resists pressing a kiss to his forehead, the soft hairs pushing at the top of her lip, but he's too close, and warm, and he smells like hotel linens and Scotch and so many years of her life.

"Come on Doctor Seuss, you can do better than that."

They lay in silence for a few minutes, Logan's head heavy, his hair tickling at her chin. The room itself is stale and too lived in, like Logan's not left this room, or this bed, or even this position in many hours, maybe even days. His muscles tense, instead of the intended relaxation, under her perfunctory back patting.

A headache builds behind her eyes, a mixture of surging hormones, caffeine avoidance and tension.

She tries to mind meld with Lorelai, what would she do, what would she say, how would she go about making this better? She can't think of where she'd find bread, let alone a toaster and a banana to mash on top for him, and she hasn't packed any sparkly Barbie band aids. _My mom could fix this. Someone else could fix this._

A fresh terror invades her gut: she's going to be the only person who can fix something for someone else very soon.

Rory shifts under the weight of Logan's upper body, and eventually he sags against her, relaxing as she drops her hand between the wings of his shoulder blades and rubs.

"I'm so sorry about your parents, Logan." She means it, no matter what ill-feelings or resentment she's ever harbored toward the Huntzbergers, or all the ways that they laid tracks that locomoted Logan straight out of her life.

"Wanna hear something funny? Odette left me an hour before I got the call." He doesn't laugh. Something in Rory's chest tightens. "It was all very dramatic and French, and I think it may have impacted the jet stream in such a manner that it pulled my parents' plane straight out of the sky. So in a way, this is all my fault."

"You know that's not true."

"I know that I was engaged to someone I didn't love enough, and when she called my bluff, the sheer weight of my parents' pending disappointment crushed an entire airliner, and, in turn, a small vineyard in the Napa Valley. It's science, Rory. Science."

She hates herself a little for the butterfly wing of hope his break-up affords her, if even for a few seconds. "It's coincidence."

They lay quiet and still for what feels like forever, because Logan is neither of those things at a stretch, and she almost convinces herself he's asleep when he cuts into her thoughts with a blatant and forceful sigh.

Her circulation is being slowly siphoned off from the weight of Logan's leg across hers, and she gently pushes him off so she can extract herself finally from the bed. She putters around the hotel bathroom, washing her face, her hands, brushing her teeth and examining her face for physical evidence that could betray her own secret.

Four tall glasses are collected near the sink, and Rory fills each one to capacity with water from the tap, hoping to convince Logan that hydration is paramount to sleep.

She juggles the water glasses like she's working at the diner, and forces one into his hand as she sets down the others. "Drink. And when you finish that, drink more."

"Ah, my favorite drinking philosophy," he says drolly, but follows her orders to the letter, downing three glasses in short succession.

"I'm sorry I didn't get any ice. If you want, I can…" Rory trails off, folding her leg underneath her on the side of the bed and perching on her ankle.

He reaches out, hand still clammy from holding his glasses of tap water, "No, stay."

"I'll find some aspirin. You'll need it."

"I'm good, Ace, stay." Logan picks up the fourth glass, rolls it between his hands. "I'm still marveling at the fact that my ex-girlfriend shows up for me the second I call her but my real friends didn't."

"They don't know what to say, Logan. They don't know how to help you." She bites the inside of her lip, and is about to say, _Neither do I,_ when Logan's fingers land on the angle of her jaw. She pulls back as his lips land sloppily on her chin, his other hand coming up to cup the side of her face. "Logan. What are you doing?"

"You're all I have left, Ace."

She can't imagine that it's true, so it must be both of their exhaustion talking, "I think it's time for sleep now. Maybe things will look clearer in the morning."

She feels the barest of nods against her shoulder, and the hand that had just cupped her face splays over the flat of her belly. Her first instinct is to flinch, but there's nothing there yet to hide, everything is still mostly concave. He mumbles something then, something that sounds eerily like, "I can't do this alone," but it's late, and he's still a little drunk, and if that's what he actually said, she'll eat her hat.

"G'night." She does kiss him then, a dry one to the crest of his hairline, the only part of him she can reach, what with her hands pinned by the weight of his arm across her chest.

He hums a few practically tuneless bars of the Golden Girls theme song, and she slowly acquiesces to the koala-like nature of Logan's nuzzling.

She almost has herself convinced, as she lays with her fingers threaded through Logan's fine, short, softer than she remembers, hair. _This is friendship, nothing more_. She repeats it like a mantra, willing it to be true, as she listens to Logan's breathing deepen, and certainly not as her own pulse slowly matches his.

She wakes a few hours later; Logan has the blackout shades drawn, so it could be anytime. She just knows it's the middle-she's not well rested yet, and she doesn't quite have to pee enough to warrant a trip out of the warmth of her bed-their bed. Logan's leg is looped casually over both of hers, his right hand on her left shoulder, arm snugly across her chest.

His eyelids are still closed and he's vulnerable, and she thinks, just kiss him. His lips are full and his cheeks are flushed pink and she's close enough that she can spot little imperfections across the bridge of his nose, tiny hairs out of place against his forehead.

She doesn't kiss him, but she thinks about it for the rest of the night and wakes up the next morning still wondering why she didn't.

 _Friendship_.

That is exactly why however many hours ago, she boarded a plane in yoga pants, no bra, and mismatched athletic socks to fly across a zillion time zones in the middle of the night with zero advance notice. _Friendship_.

(Later, she finds herself having to really build up to an acceptable level of outrage when the news page of her email account touts her bedraggled, no bra wearing self with the caption, "Mystery Woman Rushes to Aid of Grieving Huntzberger Heir.")

She shifts, and his hand slides down from her shoulder, hitching in the pocket of her stretchy pants, the weight of it balanced on the curve of her hip. Logan murmurs something sleepy and warm into the back of her neck, and Rory settles back against the planes of his chest.

They spend the day drifting in and out of naps, between room service deliveries and pots of fresh coffee. Early pregnancy means that she could happily Rip Van Winkle her life away, but something causes her to stir, and she struggles to find her bearings.

Logan's computer provides an eerie blue light that illuminates the area nearest the closet, making the hanging clothing seem alien and strange. Logan is nowhere to be found, until she realizes there's a low murmuring coming from behind the bathroom door. After a few minutes, the door opens, light flicking quickly off. Rory's eyes readjust as Logan removes his bluetooth and places it gently on the desk next to his glowing Macbook. He doesn't look much worse for the wear, even after all the drinking and his clear and present exhaustion.

"Did I wake you?" He says softly, sliding back into the high backed desk chair. "I'm sorry."

"No, it was just," She doesn't want to admit how her body seemed to sense his absence, even in sleep, "I had to pee."

"Paris never sleeps, so." He shrugs, as if that explains everything. "Bathroom's all yours."

"Just tell me if you want me to go. If I'm an imposition."

"You aren't." His face goes a little blank. Inscrutable. Like they both forgot that he called her here. "There are just a lot of...Odette called."

A litany of comforting platitudes run through her head, and she ends up with, "Gotcha."

She tries to ignore the quizzical look that passes over Logan's face, but instead shuts herself in the bathroom, knees up to her chin as she sits on the closed lid of the toilet bowl and attempts to calm her breathing. Logan's moving around in the room, presumably reacquainting himself with the life of a human being, or with another bottle of scotch, and she's in here hiding because she's a big, fat chicken.

When Rory emerges, teeth freshly brushed and ego gently dented, Logan's sitting cross-legged on the bed, laptop balanced on his knees. "Do you think that I could talk my wedding caterers into moving the menu into more of a wake direction? Is filet mignon considered gauche at a funeral?"

She shrugs, because she genuinely has no idea, but he has to have people who can do this for him, so he doesn't have to. Rory slides onto the king-sized mattress, lightly closing the laptop cover and almost catching Logan's fingers in the process. "What did Odette have to say?"

"She wanted to reiterate why she left me, I presume."

"You didn't talk to her?"

Rory can't tell what Logan is thinking, she almost never could. It occurs to her then that it's probably because most of the time, he doesn't really know either. "It wouldn't change anything."

"I'm sure that she's sorry, that she regrets-"

His expression narrows, and Rory sees that Huntzberger streak of anger burble up to the surface of Logan's usually placid eyes, "I don't want to hear what she has to say right now, Rory."

"But you will. Maybe not right now, but you guys were going to-"

"If I've learned anything from all of this, Ace, it's that discretion is the better of part of valor. Hands down."

"That isn't you. You put yourself out there, you're the risk taker, the brave one."

"That used to be me. I was a kid then, and I'm not a kid now. She can keep her phone calls and her regrets and I'll not be in the position to take anymore risks. Not with her." _Not with my heart,_ is what Rory hears, even if it's not exactly what Logan means.

The day of the funeral is a mess. In its infinite wisdom, New England decides it is the exact right time for twelve inches of snow and ice to sweep through in November, stranding travelers in airports and overbooking hotels all along the eastern seaboard.

Logan is a mess. Honor is a mess. Finn and Colin are stuck somewhere in an Econolodge because of the storm and routinely send inappropriate text messages of themselves emptying their minibars, and then later, of other people's minibars in rooms that they appear not to be invited to. Emily Gilmore refuses to attend the funeral on the grounds that, "It is impolite to dance on the graves of the deceased, Rory," and she sends a large, waxy-leaved plant instead.

After the minister has gotten back into his limousine, Logan turns to Rory, his eyes rimmed red, his hand flat on the small of her back. "I should have just thrown them the Viking funeral. They would have hated that."

"Come home with me." The thought isn't even fully realized when it leaps from her mouth, but she can't imagine just leaving him all by his lonesome, not with his friends stuck god knows where and his sister having her own family to deal with. This is just being a good friend.

Proving once and for all that his sense of self preservation is well-honed, even in his grief, Logan waves her off. "Why Miss Gilmore, I'm scandalized."

"Shut up. The house is big and lonely and you shouldn't…"

"Be alone? You can leave the shoelaces and belts, Rory, I'm not on the verge of a nervous breakdown." He slips on his sunglasses, hiding the new sad lines around his eyes, and stuffs his hands deep into the pockets of his wool overcoat. He isn't eating like he should, and she knows he isn't sleeping, because she's getting manic emails from him about random impersonal topics at all hours, and she can do this, if he'll let her.

"C'mon, Huntzberger, it'll be like," she doesn't want to say the old days, because that wouldn't be much of an advertisement, "You need to regroup."

"Naw, Ace. I'm good." Logan leans over and brushes the side of her temple with his too cold lips, pushing her in the direction of her car. "Thanks for, you know, the rescue."

But somehow, three days later, Logan is barefoot in the kitchen of her grandparents' Hartford house, studiously chopping leeks for a soufflé. "Can you handle the salad?" He smiles at her, the way that makes her chest feel achey and tight, and she nods dumbly.

She can, and does, handle the salad. And then she sets their two place settings at the now drastically reduced dining room table, the joyless furniture now living between someone else's joyless four walls, or perhaps, making another family exceedingly joyful, a task that could not previously be accomplished here, by that particular dining room set.

They eat their meals in a generally companionable silence, both of them probably using the time to figure out how either of them ended up here.

Every minute she spends with Logan is another minute she should be telling him the truth about what is going on with her, but every minute passes with nary a mention. Yesterday, he found her passed out on her laptop keyboard, her forehead creating a rather impressive key smash and inserting screens of gibberish into one of her re-writes, and the day before that, she was using the Wall Street Journal as a makeshift blanket, snoring away in the breakfast nook.

"So, Ace, you know that I do not judge lest I be, you know, judged. But should I be worried? I know some really discrete rehab centers, you know, so you could get some help. If you needed it, of course." He's so earnest and sincere, and it breaks her heart, knowing that she's just experiencing the drain of the first trimester and maybe she should take his suggestion, because she's a lying monster who lies, and if that doesn't resemble some kind of addiction, she doesn't know what does.

Instead, she emits a hysterical sound that is a mixture of a sob and a guffaw, her shoulders shaking, and her hand flies to her mouth. "No, Logan, no."

Logan stands stock still for a moment, his eyes scanning her face in attempt to make sense of what is happening in front of him, and deciding whether or not he should be offended or sympathetic. He opts for sympathetic, and brings her a bowl of matzoh ball soup that he seemingly produces out of thin air, assuming that she's clearly coming down with the flu.

After she finishes the soup, he drops a kiss on the top of her head and takes her to her bed, folding down the comforter and fluffing her pillow before she sleeps. The guilt she holds seems to burnish and bloom in the depths of her stomach, then.

A few afternoons later, Rory stands stoically and watches as Logan deposits each and every electronic device that he owns-two cell phones, a satellite phone (she doesn't ask, he doesn't offer), a tablet, two laptops and an iPod-into a giant cardboard box and seals them with a resounding _thwap_ of packing tape. There's no return address, and in Logan's incomprehensible scrawl, the label is addressed to the **Huntzberger Publishing Group.** He shrugs at her, his dress shirt unbuttoned to reveal his v-neck underneath, sleeves rolled up like he's just been repairing a leaky pipe instead of preparing items for post, "I feel like my family would appreciate the ceremony in this," gesturing to the corrugated collection of ways to no longer reach him.

Rory has no doubt that they would.

They move around each other's routines easily, like this is the life they'd always been meant to have. Logan in his seemingly unending collection of threadbare band t-shirts and five days of beard growth, legs thrown casually over the arm of an original Chesterfield, reading _Slaughterhouse Five_ for the fiftieth time and pouring the next fifth of something down his throat; Rory, steadfastly editing and revising and hunching fastidiously over hundreds of index cards that detail scenes from her novel, which she shuffles and reshuffles until her eyes cross and her shoulders ache with fatigue.

Some nights, he ends up in her bed. They don't talk about it, before or after. There isn't a negotiation or a treaty or an embargo; just Rory sometimes wakes with Logan curled around her parenthetically. There are no sides of the bed, just a tacit agreement that they both remain comfortable and still, and that no one snores.

She wakes up some mornings and he isn't there; the empty space burns a little in the pit of her stomach. Like he's rejected her somehow, when there's been no reason to believe she's ever accepted him in that same way. His absence is like an ache that flares up in a long-since healed break, one that heralds rainstorms and causes her to move about more slowly during her day.

It's one of the slow days, when the revisions feel like she's sludging through mud up to her kneecaps and no amount of crackers, sleep, and ginger root seem to quell the lingering nausea that's plaguing her, when Logan stumbles upon what Rory thinks is a benign piece of mail, but turns out to be more.

He's holding something that the nurse handed her after her last doctor's visit, some pamphlet about flu shots during pregnancy, which she had accepted numbly and just stuck into her bag without a second thought. That had then stuck to the back of a file folder, which she had laid on the dining table, which Logan had begun to clear for a meal that he had just painstakingly prepared.

It is that chain of events that brings her to this moment, as her heartbeat crashes inside her rib cage and any sense of fragile normalcy they'd built here dissipates into the frosty New England night.

"You weren't going to tell me," Logan says more to himself than he does to her, and she has to grip the knob on the dining room chair to keep from pitching over, as all of her blood drains directly from her heart and into her toes. His face is completely still, but his feet are not, and he's gone before she can answer.

Rory expects the walls to shake with the slam of the door, but it's just an easy creak and slow click to close, and she pauses to allow her her blood stream time to re-route and resume carrying life-saving oxygen to vital organs.

He hasn't gotten far, just as far as the front porch, seeing as he's shoeless and keyless and now, faithless. Logan leans against the topiary, shoulders moving in that, I'm taking deep cleansing breaths kind of way, but he doesn't turn or acknowledge her when he hears the front door open.

"Logan, I-"

He holds up a hand, and her eyes trace the way the veins stand out on the backs of them, one of his cuticles has a tiny half moon of a scab. "Not now, Rory."

She supposes that should be that, that this is when she does what she's supposed to, and turns around to leave him to do whatever he needs to do in this moment. She isn't that emotionally intelligent, apparently. "I didn't mean for-"

"You did, you did mean for," he says, the bite evident, "You didn't forget, it wasn't the timing. This, this was purposeful. You meant to." She doesn't have to see his face to know that his eyes are narrowed, his jaw tight. The hand he had held aloft is now caressing a branch of the tiny shrub, toying with a leaf, picking at it until it finally floats into the pot below. "I need some time, Rory. Can I please just have that?"

She nods, even though he's not looking at her, and slips back into the house. She's washing dishes at the sink, just something to do with her hands, when she hears the front door open. After a few minutes, careful footsteps enter the room, and she feels the unfamiliar scratch of a beard at her neck, as Logan hooks his chin over her shoulder. His breath puffs against her jawline and he very carefully slides his arm around her waist, like she's the horse that could spook.

It's been weeks since they'd had a conversation that didn't somehow end up dangling in some way, like one of them was always leaving something unfinished. Or waiting for the other to fill in a gap that never seems to get filled. That morning in New Hampshire, she never meant to see or speak to him again. The Logan chapter of her life was finished, and she'd put it to bed, disconnected from him and the life that didn't exist anymore. He had had Odette and a dynasty to carry on, and she had had to realize she was the piece that didn't belong.

"I didn't want to...you're not obligated in any way to be a part of anything that you aren't ready to be a part of. I know what that's like, to feel like you're being pushed," and she didn't, not really, because look at Lorelei and how she was the immovable object in so many versions of so much of their history, "I can do this on my own. It's okay. Maybe it's better that way."

His ribs move with his intake of breath and he presses closer to her back, reaching around to quiet the faucet. "I understand why you'd think that, but you're forgetting one thing, Ace."

She's afraid to turn her head, to meet his eyes, or to see what new layer of pain she's caused him with this revelation, both the pregnancy and her utter lack of faith in him, or herself, "What's that?"

The room is silent save for a droplet from the faucet into the full pan and the squelch of the dishrag abandoned in the sink, and Logan's slow, calm breath near her ear. "You never asked me to stay."

Rory should say, I didn't know how to, or if I could, but instead, she leans farther back into his touch. It feels safer there, with the squares of their shoulders aligned and Logan's feet between hers, his heartbeat stuttering against her back. "I never did, no."

Finally the hand that's landed on her hip sneaks around to her stomach, the backs of his fingers knuckling under her t-shirt, "You could ask me now, if you wanted."


	2. These Roads Don't Move

_There is no need to say another word_  
 _It will be golden and eternal just like that_  
 _Something good will come of all things yet_

Jay Farrar- _These Roads Don't Move_

The last droplet of water _plink-plink-plops_ into the abandoned sink and Rory spends upwards of several seconds wondering if it might get deep enough to drown.

Logan's fingers are still arctic from his time outside, contemplating both shrubbery and the proper proportion of anger to betrayal, and Rory sucks in a harsh breath when he brushes them against her abdomen a second time.

The equal risk associated with each of his possible responses causes an unease in her gut that shifts pretty swiftly into queasiness, and the question almost sticks in her throat, "Is this what you really want?" Maybe what she should ask is, Am I what you really want? Because even she doesn't doesn't know the answer to that.

"C'mon, Ace, that wasn't ever a question. Ask me again." His voice is low, and soft, and nothing feels quite as risky anymore.

When she finally twists to face him, she's able to take in everything that could potentially belong to her; all that's no longer borrowed. The warm brown eyes, now a little glassy, that always seem to be searching for the comfort of hers. The softened laugh lines she helped to etch there and the deepened crinkles at his eyes, the new stubbly spiny beard that tends to border right on the edge of unkempt; all hers. Logan's still as stone, and looks as expectant as she feels, as she asks, "Will you please stay?"

Logan presses into her space, then, all hands and mouth and tongue, smelling like cold air and expensive soap, and and it's easy to imagine what forever could look like, if she'd let it.

Rory's sleep is summarily disrupted by a creaky bed frame and a twinging bladder, and as she stumbles toward semi-consciousness, she's weirdly bereft of that bright relief or the fizzy elation of a resolution. It's really more of a grey and foggy ambivalence that's blanketing her rib cage and when she crawls back into their shared bed, she avoids curling back into Logan's space, ankles and knees primly locked. Sleep doesn't return quickly, or without great effort, but it does come eventually as Rory mentally counts and recounts the seventy thousand words of a memoir she's written about why she was always supposed to be able to do this on her own.

Maybe it's the how you make a life with another person and still come out whole that's the problem she hasn't yet solved.

"We're home," she says to no one, even though that isn't quite what this is. Not now, anyway.

She wakes up to the space where Logan had been, and the smell of bacon sweeping up the grand staircase. Rory realizes that pregnancy has caused her to temporarily forget bacon, because she had just assumed that she wasn't allowed anything she liked anymore-coffee, caffeine, coffee, bacon, independence, coffee. (She's taking the coffee loss pretty hard.) Logan's in his boxer briefs, wearing a pink half apron that has ruffles on its ruffles, with his hair flattened on one side and hilariously askew on the other, but she doesn't think he's ever looked sexier to her.

"I'm sorry, is this heaven?"

Logan looks up, his cheeks pink from the frying pan steam, eyelashes golden and thick in the mid-morning sunlight. "No, ma'am. It's Connecticut." He abandons his stovetop for a moment, grabbing a steaming mug with the string of a teabag grazing its side and thrusting it into Rory's air space. "I know it's not French press or anything, but a hot beverage is a hot beverage, right?"

"Oh, how I wish that were true," Rory groans, and takes a polite sip. It's minty and thin, and it is so far from a rich and decadent Colombian anything that it makes her instantly regretful and maybe even a little bit hostile. She tries to school her face into something resembling gratitude, but Logan catches her before the completed rearrangement.

"No?"

"It's kind of like getting a glass of orange juice when you're expecting milk. It's not bad on its own, it's just, y'know, surprising. And a touch disappointing."

"Ah, the title of my new autobiography. Surprising and A Touch Disappointing: The Logan Huntzberger Story." He picks up a hot strip of bacon with his fingertips, takes a tentative bite like he's about to lose one to third degree burns. "You still like it crispy, right?"

"Just like my men."

They eat breakfast without much in the way of conversation, ankles touching under the table. Logan pages through the newspaper on his tablet, humming along with an Arctic Monkeys song that streams through the Bluetooth speakers. There's been some confusion since her grandmother moved to Nantucket about who delivers what where, so her grandfather's subscriptions to every daily paper that actually matters have all but halted. Without the rustle of a newspaper, or ink drying on the pads of her fingers, it's hard to feel like her day has begun. Rory settles for catching up on emails while trying to shake the irrational thought that sharing a life is somehow equivalent to losing one.

Breakfast dishes conquered, Logan's disappears into the den with Cat's Cradle, and Rory tucks peaceably under the crook of his knees with a mound of notes sent over from her editor. They both know that he's going to have to go back to work sometime, back to a regular routine that doesn't involve copious naps mid-afternoons and unlimited access to works of fiction. A routine that requires Logan to resume the life that he has always been so close to rejecting, but yet it somehow manages to draw him back in.

Without provocation he takes her hand, the pad of his thumb running back and forth over the smooth skin, eyes dark with something serious and real, "I'm going to win you back, y'know."

"But haven't you already won me?" Rory spreads her arms in her best impression of a game show hostess _, just look at all_ _of_ _this_ _gesture_ , batting her lashes to accompany her jazz hands.

Logan smiles, the shy one, the one that kind of lights up from the outside in and employs his whole, beautiful face. It makes her heart stutter, a little, the sincerity of it. "No, Ace, what happened yesterday, that got me back in the game. Now I gotta win."

* * *

Ever since he found out about the pregnancy, Logan's been doing his best impression of a helicopter, all hovering and buzzing overhead with righteous care and concern. Rory can't sit, stand or walk without his swooping in with some kind of helpful tip or factoid (the one in every 2000 babies being born with teeth statistic gave her nightmares for a week), and he's even started scheduling appointments to interview prospective pediatricians and nannies, without her express consent or participation. Today, she returned home from a trip to the drugstore to find three contractors, a moderately famous designer, and a feng shui expert oohing and ahhing over the potential for her mother's old room to be converted into a nursery.

Logan's clearly excited, boundlessly involved, and for some reason, all of it directly results in Rory developing a tiny itch under her skin as she considers all the ways that it's possible that he could fail her, eventually.

She spends her days holed up in the study, with her word count goals and her laptop, and Logan does whatever he does, usually without too much required supervision. Sometimes Finn or Colin or Robert will materialize like friendly apparitions in the breakfast nook, make an obscure literary reference while smelling lightly of bourbon, and disappear. It's like living with the Ghosts of Christmas Future, but without all the ominous warnings about the importance of self-transformation.

So after whatever it is that Logan gets up to during the day while Rory holds herself to her writing hours and word count goals, they reunite to sleep together in one of the guest rooms that seems to be the least likely to have been inhabited by any visiting Daughters of the American Revolution or their creepy bedclothes.

Post shower, Logan settles in under her nest of blankets, hooking his leg around hers, and sets about resuming the chapter of his Vonnegut. One of the business' lawyers had called after dinner and Logan had developed a kind of selective mutism, which often happened whenever someone from the Huntzberger Publishing Group got a wild hair and decided that Logan needed to be whatever it was that they wanted him to be at that particular moment. Apparently the re-receipt of every electronic device they'd ever provided him was purely ceremonial, and they'd managed to miss the point entirely.

With Honor married off, and Logan the last heir carrying the Huntzberger name, he holds what can only be described as an absolute burden of power. And now that there are additional Huntzbergers to think about, all the lawyers and business partners are even twitchier, which didn't seem humanly possible but then again, they may not actually be human.

(And the conversation about _that_ hadn't been a comfortable one, but seeing as Logan's parents had recently not exactly planned their demise, Logan felt pretty compelled to have something legally binding in place as soon as humanly possible.)

Even well into her second trimester, outside its usual window, her level of nausea has decided to escalate and she has to take a few deep breaths in through her nose and out through her mouth to curb the urge to reject her dinner as Logan temporarily jostles around in the covers, adjusting his pillows to an acceptable reading position.

Noticing her Lamaze style breathing, Logan absently hands her a packet of saltines from his bedside table. "Everything alright over there?" They're the first words he's said in hours and the warmth of them is almost startlingly.

She nods, relaxing the clench of her shoulders, still puffing out little breaths until the feeling passes. "It's good. I'm good. It'll pass."

Logan takes the hand holding his paperback and runs it over her knee, up toward the new keen swell of her stomach, and rubs concentric circles because she told him once a thousand years ago that was something her mom used to do for her when she didn't feel well. She's sure the goosebumps that raise just then are from the lack of warm air piping through the vents as the furnace shuts off.

They sit like that for a few minutes, Logan rubbing, Rory being silently disarmed by the gentle nature of his care and concern. "So are we annexing Rhode Island for the nursery now, or?"

"Oh, sorry about that, Ace. Colin knew a guy who knew a guy and blah blah blah, Jonathan Adler had some free time, or he owed someone a favor, but he really needed to see the space in person and he was only in town for a few days. Did we get in your way?"

"No, not at all," which was blatantly untrue, as she had tripped over the designer as she was coming out of one of the guest baths and screamed just this side of bloody murder, which frightened him to the point that he may or may not have been able avail himself of the facilities quickly enough. "It's just that I thought maybe we could, you know, do these things together. Or not knock down three walls and build a life size Victorian playhouse for the nanny to sleep in. Or, maybe, not even have a nanny. Or a playhouse."

"It's not Victorian, Rory, although Jonathan does think that would better suit the integrity of the house," he says, like he's Architectural-Freaking-Digest. "I just don't want to interrupt you when you're working, and this stuff, I didn't even think you cared about it."

"I do care. It's just...I don't want things to get away from me. First it's the nursery, and then it's the preschool, and the next thing I know, you're sending the baby to France to live with Charlotte Gainsbourg because Finn won a poker bet."

"It was Colin," he mumbles. "And didn't your half-sister live in France for a little while?"

"Yeah, I guess. But my point is, we need to do this stuff, together."

"Got it, boss." He salutes, and settles back into the pillows to commence reading, but Rory still doesn't feel particularly heard. He must sense it, then, because he picks an imaginary piece of lint off the blanket she's huddling under, and dog-ears the page in his book to mark his place to fully focus on her. It's not unlike having the mountain come to Muhammed, and she feels almost as inconsequential.

"You know that I just want better for our baby. That he or she's not just going to be some obligation to me. I am- I was always a liability, it seemed like, to Mitchum and Shira, and you were never that, not to anybody in that village who raised you, and-" The hand on her belly stills, and Logan focuses stonily on some point just beyond his fingers. "I can't be that again, your liability, her liability, too."

Something clenches in her chest, then, a fist of vulnerability. "I'm sorry. I really am sorry. I should never have tried to box you out of all of this." There are days when she's still bowled over by her own selfishness, the things that she could have cost him, or cost the baby. "I'm still trying to figure everything out, and I watched my Mom struggle but I also watched her shine, and I thought-" Her throat is getting tight, and she has to swallow hard to push down the urge to cry.

Logan's expression is one of concern and affection, and he scoots over to close the gap between them, "Hey, hey. It's okay. I'm not going to hold this against you. Well, not unless I need to," He jokes, and senses quickly it's not his best tactic, "Rory. Hey, we're going to be okay."

"But how do you know that you can forgive me?" Her words come out small and impossibly huge at all once.

His left eyebrow arches, but Logan leans into it anyway. She knows these last few weeks with her have been a hormonal highwire act, but damnit if he can't keep balance like a pro. "Because I can. Because I want to." He kisses her cheekbone, the tip of her nose, the divot of her chin. "Because when I needed you, you came for me."

All of her former ambivalence seems to be evolving into some desperate need to be right, and with him this close, this clean, it's hard to remember how she could ever have had doubts. "I'd do it again, you know, if you needed me." Logan smells like her rose shampoo and the back of his t-shirt is still damp where he didn't towel himself completely dry after his shower in his haste to crawl into bed. Nibblets of guilt build in Rory's gut, at the idea that Logan's vulnerability is somehow her advantage.

"I've run out of parents to tragically lose to airline disasters but I appreciate the sentiment." He kisses his forgiveness into her eyelid, the shell of her ear, her clavicle. "So you know, though, I'm glad you did. That you let me back in." His breath is hot against her skin, his hands finding all of their familiar haunts; the curve of her hips, the hinge of her jaw.

She pulls back, extracting herself from the light brush of his lips, the firmness of his hold. "But I was so sure. Six weeks ago, I was sure that not telling you was the right thing to do."

Logan pulls back, pinching the bridge of his nose, as confusion and irritation crisscrosses his face. "Where is this headed, Ace? You calling Eternal Sunshine now?"

"No. No. Of course not. No. I just, I was so...confident. I thought that…"

The unfortunate thing is, Logan is not slow to draw conclusions, and there's so much evidence on the table that no amount of backtracking is going to save her from his inevitable realization. The ugly one. _3, 2,1,_ and his face contorts into something less than friendly, "Oh, that I would pull a Huntzberger and control the situation? Rope you into Financially Advantageous Plan B? Or were you so sure," he says it like he's tasting something sour, "that I would be absent or irresponsible or worse, that I'd actually be present?" Strangely, he's not angry, like she'd expect and completely deserve. He's resigned to it, almost, like it's inevitable that this something beautiful he thought he had would eventually just fade away, because that's what happens to him now.

Rory'd give anything to start this conversation over, to go back to the kissing and the part where he just quietly and unconditionally forgave her. Ugh, she's getting a terrible track record with gift horses and their mouths.

"Is that it?" His features narrow, honing in sharply on her facial reactivity.

She does her best to react minimally, but the damage has already been done.

He's out of their bed, roughly grabbing a pillow and dragging a blanket over his shoulder. "You know something, Ace, I think we both need some space tonight. Well, I do anyway. I need space. Because for once, we're going to think about what Logan needs." He looks around, a little wildly, "And maybe what Logan needs is to talk about himself in the third person and sleep in the study."

"You don't have to do that. I don't want you to."

Logan stands still as stone, blanket trailing on the hardwood floor, pillow bobbing in the air with the kinetic energy of his residual annoyance. "Well, if not the study, then that guest room down the hall with the weird dolls, I'm not an animal."

"That's not what I-please don't, okay?"

"Let's just call it, okay? I don't have the answers, you don't have the answers. We need to just…"

Her heart plummets. "What do you mean, call it?"

"Go to our separate corners, cool off." He raises an eyebrow, "What, did you think I meant-"

She shakes her head.

"Because I didn't. I wouldn't." That he says barely over a whisper, but she hears it like a jet engine in a library.

Rory glances down at her hands, at the cover of the Vonnegut, the shame of her selfishness burning in her stomach. "You stay in here, Logan. You didn't...it's my fault. You didn't do anything wrong."

He starts to protest, but thinks better of it, and reluctantly rests one knee possessively on the mattress while she gathers her own notes and bedside needs into her arms, the packet of crackers leaving a breadcrumb trail across the duvet. "Rory."

She almost doesn't want to turn her head to look at him, because his voice sounds like regret and homesickness and helplessness, and she's not eager to see any of those things spelled out on his face, but she does anyway. "This is just-it's a lot. I mean, you were engaged to someone else. We had no expectations, no strings. Just a good old fashioned..." She decides that ending her thought with cuckolding is probably inadvisable.

He gestures pretty pointedly toward her belly, "Oh have we got strings, Pinocchio."

"C'mon, I've seen a lot of things, the way this stuff doesn't work out. It's my lived experience that unplanned pregnancies do not result in long healthy relationships."

"Is that what this is? Because your mom and dad couldn't make it work, we can't? It's generational now?" Logan does her the undeserved favor of staring at the end of the bed so she doesn't have to look him in the eye, "You can't keep comparing the two things. It's not fair."

"Life isn't fair, Logan. I just, I want to protect our baby from whatever heartbreak I can, and-"

"You just told me that you didn't tell me about the baby because you were worried that I'd actually be around, so don't talk to me about being fair. I haven't done anything wrong. I am not going to disappoint you the way that Christopher disappointed Lorelai, disappointed you. I won't."

"Oh, come on. You can't promise that. That's like saying 'It will never rain as long as I'm around' or 'No more red lights on Friday!' We don't live in some music montage laden dream world."

The muscle in his jaw twitches, shoulders sinking in defeat, "No, no we don' know what, though? I get that this may still not be real for you yet, but it is, i-i-it's real for me."

It hits her then, like a cannonball to the chest, that it hasn't been Logan not wanting to settle down all these years. It's all the ways that they've always struggled to articulate their own needs spelled out like lights down a runway. A simple, straight line that blazes right back to her.

She nods, swallowing the past the unpleasant lump that's building in her throat. "Sleep well, okay?"

As the door latches behind her, she could swear she hears a gentle, "'Night, Ace."

And if Rory ever thought it was difficult to sleep beside Logan, it's damn near impossible without him at all.

She tosses and turns most of the night, and gives up trying as the golden tendrils of dawn creep through the guest room blinds. Rory crawls back into the space she left empty in their bed exactly thirty seconds before Logan's first day back at work alarm chimes, and he drowsily reaches for her arm.

"Baby, we gotta stop meeting like this."

His sleep-warm lips softly brush her temple, his kiss an unearned benediction as he blearily presses the snooze button and cradles her in his arms for the next nine minutes, and then the next nine minutes after that.

Her Mom invites Rory for dinner in Stars Hollow because she can sense the fatigue in her daughter's tone, even in text messages, but then ends up having an unexpected meeting in the city about the inn expansion and needing to stay overnight for it. After the standard, "You good? Good," introductory conversation, Rory and Luke spend a few minutes in awkward silence until Luke realizes that he speaks the universal language of Gilmore Girls: food.

"Your Mom said she was in the mood for something beefy, and I didn't think to question." He says, as if in apology. The house is already warm with the smell of fresh bread that she knows Luke got up early to bake, and there's an apple pie with a carefully rolled lattice crust cooling on the counter. She realizes that she's drooling like a cartoon cat as she settles in at the kitchen table.

"I missed thirteen years," Luke says into the pot of stew he's stirring on the stove.

"Sorry?" Luke's been in her life as long as anyone, and she can count the number of conversations he's initiated with her on both of her hands, especially if her mom's not directly involved.

"April. I missed the first thirteen years of her life because Anna didn't think it mattered to me."

Rory closes her laptop. "Oh. April. Yeah."

"The kid, he's not perfect, I know. He can be a little immature, and maybe dismissive, and I know that you and he were...you know, when he was," he trails off, since the idea of Luke having to say "having an affair" or Jesus tap dancing Christ, _fuck buddies_ , sends Rory into a near fatal cardiac arrhythmia.

"It was complicated," she interjects.

Luke sighs, clearly relieved that he doesn't have to find a suitable word to describe it, and the _abort!abort!_ alarm in his eyes gradually fades into a paternal warmth, "Yes, yes, it was complicated. And I hate to interfere, because you know that isn't...we don't…" He takes another grounding breath, because if he's not telling Rory how to fix her leaky faucet, or what temperature to preheat the oven to, he's not really conversing, "Rory, no matter what happens after this, you did the right thing, telling him."

It takes all of her strength not to burst into tears right then, but for as difficult as it was for Luke for say, it's just as hard to hear.

"I just-"

Brandishing bowls heaping with meat and vegetables, Luke slides into the chair across from her. "I was a science project, Rory, and I don't wish that for anybody. And that Huntzberger kid, regardless of whatever douchebaggy stuff he's done in the past, he's a good egg. He cares about you." Luke is about to break the record for the most words she's ever heard him say to her at a stretch about something personal, or non-Jess related, and is showing no signs of stopping. "Did I ever tell you about the Vineyard? When he helped me with that gift for your Mom? He saved my hide then, and didn't say a word. He didn't have to do that, God knows I didn't treat him well enough that he owed me bupkiss, and still, he-"

"Thanks, Luke."

He raises an eyebrow and it treads perilously close to his baseball cap, "What? You don't want my big finish?"

"It was a pretty big start," she says. "You led off with kind of a home run there."

Luke smiles, maybe just the tiniest bit proud. "Not to, you know, compare apples and oranges, but I know what it's like to spend too much time watching other people have the life I wanted. And maybe he was doing what he thought you wanted him to do, or expected him to do, but it wasn't what he really wanted." He takes a bite of his dinner, chewing thoughtfully. "Needs more pepper. You want?"

She shakes her head, savoring the garlic and the deep rich flavor of the sauce. "It's delicious, Luke, thank you."

"Do you love him?"

Rory almost drops her spoon.

"Listen, I only ask because that's the thing that matters. Everything else, it's just gravy." He digs into his bowl with a private smile, and the rest of the meal in an easy silence.

Luke packs her down with containers of leftovers and hunks of fresh soda bread, and three quarters of the apple pie ( _Don't tell your Mom, she'll skin me alive if she finds out that there was pie here and now there's not)_ and stands waving on the end of the driveway as she reverses, like he's seeing her off on a longer trip than 35 minutes on the turnpike.

She's restless and wired and ready to burst with something unnamed, and after she kicks off her shoes and deposits her spoils in the refrigerator, she realizes the house is too still for Logan to be awake. She ends up padding through the halls aimlessly before she gets to bed, taking an extra lap as if she's securing the perimeter. Checking window latches and deadbolts as if there is any slight risk of intrusion, when she knows exactly where she feels most invaded.

Logan is on his side, curled toward the wall, his back broad and exposed beneath the covers that are pulled up only to his waist. He's a hot sleeper, she'd been forced to remember quickly, always kicking off blankets and eschewing shirts and sharing a bed with him is always a little like a nightly turf war. Rory can't decide if she should give him his space or bookend his curved form, so she lays still and quiet. He turns on his own, bumping into her new presence with his knees, slings an arm across her middle possessively, and makes her the little spoon. She tentatively stretches her toes across his shin bone, and he reaches to envelop both of her icy feet between his calves, which serve as an instant heating element.

"You don't have to do that, you know. They're freezing."

She shifts in his arms to face him and he opens one eye, surprised. "'S' alright. Makes me feel alive." He seems to settle back into sleep, his face slack and peaceful, and something in her chest surges, full. "'Ow was it?"

"It was good. Really really good. There's pie."

"'S good. You needed it, Ace." Logan says, his breath warm and stale on her throat as his hand moves down to the curve of her belly and gives it a light caress. ""Night, babe."

A few minutes pass as Logan's breathing stays light and even, and Rory traces the line of his nose with the tip of her finger. "Hey, Logan?"

"Hmm?"

"So I think that you should know that you, you're a good egg. And I just...I love you. So, I love you. And good night." She considers pulling the blanket over her head.

Both eyes open. "You find out that you're dying or something?"

"No! What? No!"

Logan smiles, "Am I dying?"

"No. You'd better not."

"Okay, just checking. I love you too, Ace." His lips brush her earlobe and she shivers involuntarily. "Good night."

"'Night." She closes her eyes and the next thing she knows, she's pinned beneath Logan as he looms over her, now entirely wide awake and confused.

"Wait. What just happened."

"I thought we were going to sleep and suddenly I was transported to some kind of Greco Roman wrestling practice."

"It's sexy wrestling practice, don't be ridiculous." Logan's grip on her wrist eases, and he lowers himself back down next to her. "Rory, did you just...I was asleep." He squeaks out the last part. "I feel like something may have just happened and I missed it."

"Nothing happened. I'm just glad you're here. And I thought it was important that I inform you of that."

"And this isn't one of those lucid things or inception dreamscapes that people get themselves caught up in?"

"Logan."

"Okay, because I haven't had the easiest time lately, and it would kind of break my heart if what I think happened was just a figment of my imagination. Don't break my heart, Gilmore."

Rory settles with her head on his chest, Logan's heartbeat thrumming methodically in her ear, "That goes ditto for you, Huntzberger."

There are no fewer than eight behemoth artificial Christmas trees in the basement of her grandparents' house, but somehow Logan convinces her that a spruce pine is the only viable option for a proper New England Christmas. Most importantly, he manages to blithely ignore the look of abject panic on Rory's face when he announces his intentions to both locate and maim said tree, somewhere in the wilds of Connecticut. Or maybe it's Vermont, because things get a little blurry after he refers to himself as a recreational lumberjack.

Logan's able to be in the doctor's office to see the baby's ultrasound, after he was denied the first heartbeat (which still burrows into Rory's psyche and sticks with guilt) and they both tear up when the technician announces that they're expecting a girl.

The Friday after New Years, her Mom manages to invite herself and Luke over for dinner, cackling into the phone, _The vicious cycle continues!_ which somehow evolves into inviting Paris, because the kids are with Doyle for the weekend, and before Rory knows it, she's talking about putting a leaf in the dining table. Friday afternoon finds Logan and Luke shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen, wordlessly handing over vegetables and steaming lobsters like they've been cooking together for years.

"I just hope this kid gets your coloring, Rory, otherwise she'll end up a blob of oatmeal until her second birthday," Paris says, over salmon puffs and gin martinis (soda water for Rory) in the living room.

"Thanks, Paris, you really know how to make a guy feel like a million bucks." Rory watches as Logan's fist clenches and unclenches, but his voice fails to betray any tension. She can't deny the surge of pride that she feels.

"I'm not here to placate your ego, Huntzberger. I'm here for hard truths and to make sure that your baby mama here realizes that you're still just a hairdo with sociopathic tendencies. And I'll spare you the 'I have a firearm and a shovel, don't make me use them' speech but-" Paris says, planting herself very sturdily on the arm of the sofa.

Logan gives her a tight smile. "Well, I can't say that I don't appreciate your candor, Paris, but I have some bisque that needs my attention." Over the years, Logan's clearly learned that the best offense with Paris is no offense at all, followed immediately by turning tail and walking briskly out of the room.

Paris turns back to Rory, "Well, he's coming along nicely."

"Paris! You just eviscerated him in three sentences and now he's coming along nicely?"

"With Mitchum gone, he needs someone to remind him that he's not the alpha all the time. I'm merely filling a void."

"It was really more of a soul sucking vortex and it's been nice to have a brief respite from it."

Paris gives her a sharp look, one that can only be followed by something cutting, yet bone-chillingly accurate. "I just want you to be happy."

"I think I am."

"Well, I want you to know it." Paris flashes Rory a pitiless smile and starts gathering plates and utensils, stacking them in a measure of domesticity Rory has not previously witnessed. "We can't go back to those depression bangs that you usually grow when you and Logan are together."

"Those weren't depression bangs! Those were the-You know what, Paris. You're right. I can't go back to the depression bangs."

Later in bed, Logan sighs and rests his head on the swell of Rory's belly. He's been talking to the baby more lately, reading her stock tips and articles from HuffPo that he critiques simultaneously because he wants her to have a sense of the world before she enters it. "I'm happy to see that Paris is still twelve pounds of mean in a five pound bag."

Rory scrapes her fingernails down and over his scalp in a crosshatch, causing Logan to emit a little humming whine of appreciation that travels in a pleasant current straight down to her feet. "She's protective of me."

"She's a wolfhound with opposable thumbs and a vendetta."

"Paris is hardly feral."

His hand pauses where it's tapping out a little beat on her kneecap. "I have not entirely unfounded concerns that she'll eat our child as a display of dominance."

"She means well."

He inhales, exhales slowly, steadies himself. "She does."

"And I know that you mean well, too."

Logan's head stills, then turns up and back so that he's watching her upside down through spidery lashes. "Do you?"

"I'm starting to."

His face blooms with a smile, wide and bright, and it does wonders to skim off at least a few more of the thin layers of doubt that she's been wishing would finally begin to dissolve.

No one in their house has made a move to take down the Christmas lights, even well after the giant spruce of Logan's dreams has dried out and been disposed of in the compost. There's something about writing under tiny twinkling lights that makes Rory feel like fairies are living in her computer and helping her work. Plus, they make everything dreamlike and gauzy, and maybe she's willing to live in more of a fantasy world these days.

It's after 11 o'clock and she hasn't budged from her desk in hours, but a squirmy fetus too near a full bladder propels her out of the office. Logan has been travelling for work again, which he promises will stop when the baby arrives, but his plane landed after dinner, and she'd greeted an exhausted, hollowed out shell of a Huntzberger when she'd opened the front door to welcome him home. Luckily, he's passed out across their bed with his laptop open next to him, dead to the world, and the sight of him there sneaks in and presses on that soft, open affection she holds somewhere in her chest. She bends carefully to close the computer and cover her slumbering Logan with a warm blanket when she notices the website that's still open on the screen.

"Are you moving out?" It comes out louder than she means it to, but to hell with being polite when the bottom drops out from under you.

Logan snorts a little, jerking awake at the tone of her voice. "Huh? Ace." His eyes follow hers to the bright white of the screen and the realtors website. "Oh. No." He snaps the cover closed and sits up, pillow creases fresh on his cheek, his hair mashed flat on one side. "I'm not...this wasn't meant to be permanent, Rory. You were being accommodating, and I know that you appreciate your space, and we're not...we're dating. Dating people don't live together right away, and I thought-."

"Dating people don't have babies, either, Logan. I just…" _assumed you'd stay here_ , she thinks. "Why didn't you say something?"

"Why didn't you?"

In her defense, the status quo was the status quo and she thought everything was in its rightful place. He was designing a nursery for fuck's sake. Who designs a nursery and then gets their own apartment?

"We should get married," she blurts, just as he says, "Do you need to take some time?" Like they're the world's worst gunslingers at high noon.

"Logan."

"Ace. You know I would, in a second. I love you, and I want that with you, but is that what you want? What you really, really want? You keep skulking around here-"

"I wouldn't call it skulking. That implies shadows. If anything, I slink."

"Okay, fine." He concedes. "You been slinking around here like you're the Pink Panther and I'm Inspector Clouseau, the Peter Sellers version, thank you very much, and even though you're very pregnant with my child, and I have made zero attempts to leave, you still doubt that I'm capable of sticking around."

"That's not what it is, Logan."

"So tell me what it is."

"It's not that." And it's not, probably. There's a reason why her default setting for the last god knows how long is to call Logan when she gets upset, and it's not because it's a bad habit or muscle memory.

It's having sides of the bed and memorizing each others scars and she's been in love with him for almost two decades now, but it never gets easier. When is it ever going to fucking get easier?

She finds herself in her car, her phone clutched in her hand, no coat, no purse; full bladder. Before she knows it, she's driving toward Stars Hollow, down all the familiar highways like there's nowhere else she should be.

Her mom and Luke are surprised, but not completely unaware, which makes Rory suspect that Logan texted one or both of them, because just like she knows where he keeps his scars, he knows where she keeps her heart. Her mom comes at her with grabby hands, and Luke thrusts a cup of hot chocolate just how she likes it, with both marshmallow fluff and jumbo marshmallows, under her nose. There's Twizzlers and tater tots and nachos and tiny powdered donuts lined up on the table like a junkfood Thanksgiving feast and she could develop gestational diabetes just looking at it. Her mom catches her eyeing the smorgasbord, "What? It was movie night. I was prepared."

Luke kisses the top of her head and shuffles off to prepare for his early morning wake up call, and her mom just lets her lay in her lap cradling the bag of Twizzlers for the longest time.

Rory listens to the familiar creaks of the old house, the floorboards that complain even when no one's standing on them, and waits for the inevitable question. Lorelai pats her arm steadily as she gives Rory a gentle nudge. "C'mon baby girl, you've got to get back where you belong."

"But this is where I belong. Here, in Stars Hollow, on this lumpy couch with the wine stains and my mother's bony hip digging into my shoulder."

"Thank you for calling me bony. No, you're bigger than this now. This may be where you started, it's not where you're gonna end up. You need to go home."

"Excuse you. This is my home."

"Sure, you're always welcome here, and in daylight even, but kid, this ain't your home."

Rory sniffles loudly and Lorelai readjusts her socked feet on the coffee table. "You know, I never meant for you to have to do any of this on your own. I wanted you to be able to take care of yourself, your way, be totally independent...okay, so I'm getting how you may have gleaned lifetime of solitude from my example. But I'm here to tell you, it's in case of emergency, break glass."

"But, but we just see things so differently. Every time I think we've got it licked, there's yet another curveball."

"You know, that's nice, sometimes, to have that perspective. Think of what you and I could have avoided were it not All Lorelai, All the Time."

"But having Dad or someone else around might have only compounded the mistakes."

"Your dad and I, we were young in the all wrong ways. You and Logan, that's...the differences are astounding."

"It's the parallels that worry me."

"Logan is not your Christopher."

"Where he sees firelight, I see suffocating smoke."

"Rory, that's why you have him in your life. To make ordinary things into…more."

"Whose side are you on here?"

"You love him, baby, and it's scary. But you have to let go. Or hold on. Whichever one you're supposed to be doing where you make this work. And not just because you aren't the only one this will affect."

She's sheepish when she unlocks the front door, and her stomach does a roundoff back handspring into the base of her spine when she sees Logan bathed in the glow of the white holiday lights, dejectedly nursing a scotch.

He's barefoot but still in the dress pants and oxford shirt from his trip, and he looks so despondent that all she wants is to feel the sinew of his shoulder under her chin and his breath on her neck and not all this stupid distance anymore.

"Don't move out." She blurts, dropping the coat her mom loaned her onto the ground behind her, not caring about anything but getting to Logan before it's too late.

His voice is raw from disuse when he finally speaks, after what feels like eons, "You know, just once I wish you'd properly estimate the way I care for you. You're always all over the place with it, like you want to be able to take it out and hold it in your hand. When are you going to believe me that I love you the exact right amount?"

"I do believe you. I'm just...sometimes I don't believe my own hype."

"Well, I am telling you."

"Sometimes I'm convinced that the only way to do something is my way."

"This I can vouch for."

"And I don't mean for it to alienate you, or to leave you out of my decisions, and I don't want you to leave me out because you don't think I can handle... I just don't know always how to tell people when I feel certain things, always. I mean, my mother once lived with a baby deer in the bathroom for six days because she was too afraid to confront it."

"So you're saying this is a hereditary trait?" At least he has the decency to look amused.

"I'm saying it is a learned behavior, and it may not actually be pathological."

"So medication is out?"

"I mean, not for you."

"Oh, thank god."

"We're in this together, Huntzberger. I got you."

"Hey, everybody needs somebody to take care of them. Even Gilmores." He's got her by the shoulders now, "Just let me take care of you and the little hitchhiker, okay? Ace?" She expects to be met by brown eyes filled with bone weary resignation but instead they're soft, expectant, full of hope. "I promise. I'm not going anywhere."

She needs to be more careful with the things she loves, she realizes as he runs his hands over her waist. Careful, and far more protective.

In a fit of outrageous masculinity and possibly a touch of third trimester paternal insanity, Logan drags Rory to a Home Depot deep in the suburbs, with its towering industrial ceilings and aisles and aisles of things that Rory has absolutely no interest in nor ability to readily identify by sight. He still wants to design a nursery and build a crib and maybe raise a barn in his spare time, she isn't entirely sure, but his enthusiasm is strangely contagious.

Automatic doors hydraulically release them into the wilds of Connecticut, carts overflowing with paint cans and rollers and two by fours and wood putties, until Logan realizes that they didn't really consider the size of their vehicle versus the amount of supplies he's just purchased. So they drive home with the paint rolling around in the trunk and the tarps and rollers in the backseat, and Logan cheerfully chalks up crib building to another one of his misdirected pipe dreams.

Two days later, Jonathan Adler and the entirety of the Life and Death Brigade are painting the walls of the nursery a very delicate teal, and Rory doesn't even blink.

In month eight, she makes the inevitable transition from a gliding walk to a lumbering one, and Logan wisely neglects to point it out when he notices. She's never really had a negative relationship with her body, if she's ever had one at all-she's never been obsessed with the numbers on the scale or overly critical about the size of her hips. Sure, boobs would have been nice once upon a time, but they were more for other people than herself anyway, and no one else had filed any complaints.

But pregnancy means paying attention to everything about your body; the bloating, the weird little cramps, the potential for contractions. Even the way her own bones, down to the phosphorous and calcium, start to spread and widen to accommodate the whole process. Suddenly she finds herself monitoring blood pressure, fetal movement, and measuring protein, cutting back on salt. ( _There's another word for that_ , her mom says, _it's called caring_.)

The Christmas lights stay up on purpose now, and Logan even acquiesces to hanging more in the nursery because they're festive and beautiful and they remind Rory of all the ways that she's finally opened herself to this, and of that night when she ran away from home. They remind her that this is where she's chosen to build a life and this is the person she's chosen to help her build it.

Sure, he's confusing and layered and occasionally forgets what power he has over her heart, but he's kind and he's protective, and she knows that he only wants to make her happy. Even when he's tired or frustrated, or when she's being stubborn and shutting him out, he's coming back and hammering down those walls. He's built his own home with her, when he tucks himself under her legs on the sofa, or crawls into bed with the baby burrowing into his chest, his foot wrapping around her ankle so as not to wake her, but still clamoring for the light touch.

He's home, no matter the four walls or the address.

Bringing baby Lorelai home is a three ring circus of grandmothers and mothers and overzealous obstetricians and high school best friends, but Rory wouldn't have it any other way. Labor is hard, but motherhood is harder, and thank God she has a partner for the late nights and the early mornings and the wailing that persistently manifests in a tiny person seemingly at random.

She's supposed to be sneaking in a nap as Luke and her mom coo over their new granddaughter in an absolutely separate area of the house to allow Rory time to rest, but something about the complete silence is more unsettling than relaxing after six days of an utter lack of it. Rory finds Logan sacked out on the floor of the nursery like he just dropped there out of pure exhaustion (and despite the fact that there's a perfectly functional bed in the alcove near the crib), and she kneels down to cover him with one of Lorelai's baby blankets, the pink fluffy one with the unicorns. Logan stirs, finding her wrist with his warm hand. "Ace. What time is it?"

"Quiet time."

"I'm not familiar with that time of day. Where's Bea?" Somehow Logan managed to assign the baby a nickname within her first twenty minutes of life, because three Lorelais were overwhelming to him both in theory and in practice.

"The Grandmas Gilmore and Grandpa Luke," she whispers, because that's the tone of voice they use now, for everything. She snuggles down next to the father of her child, burrowing into his body heat, and pulls a corner of the blanket over her shoulder. "I'm supposed to be taking Rory time."

"You had thirty odd years of that already, what do you need with it now?" He yawns mightily and snuffles into her neck. "I think I came up here for a box of wipes two hours ago and never made it back."

"She cannot have gone through that whole package today. Is she eating them?"

"Gilmore women have great appetites, but I feel like baby powder scented tissue is going above and beyond. Your mom is a little liberal with them, I think. Anyway." His hand wanders down to her waist. "Is this what we're going to be talking about now? Politics, art, why is our child eating our baby wipes?"

Rory nods. "Our lives have taken a drastic turn."

Logan wriggles around like he has an itch, and digs through his pants pockets like he's misplaced something.

"Can I help you?"

"Shh. I've almost," He lifts his hips, elbows her in the ribcage, and then finally completes whatever task that he intended to accomplish. "Got it."

There's a blue box coming toward her face and before she registers where the box is from and what could be held inside within her baby-addled brain, a horror movie scream comes from the doorway. "WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW."

"Mom-" Rory's heart hammers inside her chest with both fright and anticipation. Baby Bea squawks from her perch against Lorelai's chest, because apparently babies sense fear just like dogs.

Logan isn't quite sure what to make of their new audience, and the unicorn blanket slips down off his shoulder as he struggles into a kneeling position. "See? I told you there was no such thing as quiet time. But that's not why you called." He scratches his head with the side of the ring box. "Oh. Yeah. Married. I would like for you to marry me, Lorelai Leigh Gilmore, and I was waiting for the right time, but it occurs to me that this is the right time, because every minute I spend with you is the right time." He's shaking, and she's shaking, and this isn't at all how she pictured this happening, if she ever pictured it at all.

"Say yes, Mommy," says a voice that most definitely did not come from a six day old child, and behind that, her grandmother murmurs, "Oh, this definitely brings me joy."

They're both kneeling now, and Logan, with spit up on his t-shirt and a unicorn blankie wrapped toga-like over his shoulder, smiles at her with the strength of a supernova. "Ace. This isn't funny. I can't do the silent response to a proposal in a room full of people again. I'm gonna need something."

She isn't sure she even has the power of speech, but not nearly for the reasons she did the last time.

He leans over, carefully removing the ring from the box and picking up Rory's hand, "Blink twice for yes, Ace."

She squeezes her eyelids shut, opens and closes them again.

A member of the peanut gallery sighs dreamily and when Rory opens her eyes, Logan and Bea both stare at her with identical uneasy expressions. She clears her throat because there's something clearly stuck there, and she answers him the only way that she can. "Yes. Yes. Of course."

She's surrounded then by three other generations of Gilmore Girls and her future husband, some handsier than others, and nothing has ever felt more real.


End file.
